


A Song of Ice and Fire

by orphan_account



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Abandonment, Adopted Children, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Children, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Baby Names, Background Relationships, Child Abandonment, Child Neglect, Childhood, Childhood Trauma, Children, Children of Characters, Elemental Magic, F/M, Fire, Fire Powers, Hetalia Countries Using Human Names, I Made Myself Cry, I'm Bad At Summaries, I'm Bad At Tagging, I'm Bad At Titles, Ice, Ice Powers, M/M, Magic, Magical Realism, Men Crying, Middle Names, Military Background, Multi, Names, Neighbors, Newborn Children, Parent-Child Relationship, Past Child Abuse, Pet Names, Snow and Ice, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-28
Packaged: 2020-11-08 07:03:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20831348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: In a world of elementals, ice and fire are separated between two continents: Crystalline and Blazia.And then one day, an ice baby drifts onto the shore of the fiery continent.





	1. Drifting

Timo stood on the edge of the water, staring out past the coast. He was wrapped in a thick fur; that of a spotted seal. His husband had a sort of talent when it came to clubbing a seal and harvesting its fur, an he knew exactly what his spouse wanted in a good fur. He wanted it thick and coarse, like that of the hay he had only seen in paintings and heard tell of from wandering traders, which was exactly what adult spotted seal fur felt like. It was coarse and uncomfortable to the touch on the outside, but inside of the coat, his husband had lined it with the fur of a cat, so that it was soft and warm when Timo wore it. And he loved his husband for knowing him so well and taking care of him without having to say a word.

Timo's husband, Berwald, was a very quiet man. However, that may have been because he was deaf and couldn't truly understand a word that the Finn was saying without reading his lips or having him use sign language. Timo, however, had no idea how to speak in sign language, and he gave up trying to learn very early on when he found out that Berwald could read lips, anyway. However, it became hard for them to even talk to each other when Timo became pregnant, but not in a bad way. Timo would lay on the couch and the first thing Berwald would do was start a fire and throw a blanket made from soft baby harp seal fur over him, massaging his back after he fixed the Finn a hot cocoa. Then the two would cuddle as Berwald rubbed Timo's bump as it grew, kissing the surface of it in order to let their unborn child know that he had a loving father.

Berwald and Timo's attitude toward their baby changed after the birth, however.

The birth itself was a lengthy one. It started just around a half hour after the men had eaten dinner that Timo had started feeling contractions. Berwald had went to get buckets of water from the river and heated them up over the fire just enough, putting them all in a tub and helping a naked Timo into it. Berwald would occasionally bring Timo out of the water and sit by fire as he heated up the water again, but then he would bring the Finn back into the tub and massage his back, just like he used to by the fire. And then, Timo's water finally broke, and they were off on a ride to the birthing maidens. The reason they didn't wait for the contractions to speed up was simple—it would take almost two whole hours to get to the maidens by horse, and while it would be just a little faster if they ran, Timo wasn't even able to walk because of how painful he found the contractions to be. So Timo and Berwald took their beloved horse, Upea, towards the much larger village two hours away so Timo could give birth to their unborn child.

Once they got there, Timo was fully dilated and ready to push, so he did so. After around an hour, he had birthed a small baby boy, but everything went wrong after that. He didn't cry at all after leaving the comfort of Timo's womb, and simply allowed the fluid in his lungs to drip out of his stuffy nostrils as he opened his eyes. Everyone went to crowd around the unborn child because they were sure a beautiful mother and a handsome father would create a gorgeous little boy. But everything was wrong with the baby. He had a gap in his lip that made a dark red, almost bleeding trail leading into his right nostril. His eyes were dark and covered with blue; there was no white or even a pupil anywhere to be seen. And the poor boy could barely move his neck, arms, or legs because they were thick and rolled with fat so badly that the boy might as well have had no limbs at all.

Berwald simply handed the child to a birthing maiden and completely ignored him as he tended to Timo, telling him that he was sorry such an ugly child had come out of him and that it must have been an honest mistake. One of the birthing maidens began to curse and scream at God for damning these perfect and loving parents with a baby that couldn't be accepted by anyone, while another simply and warily laid the child in Timo's arms so he could take a look at the monstrosity that had left his baby and freed him from God's curse. And Timo began sobbing, horrified that such a creature had escaped him. Quickly everyone in the room made the assumption that the unnamed baby was not embedded in Timo by God, but rather by the Devil himself, and something had to be done.

This brought Timo to where he was at that very moment: standing at the edge of the Arctic Ocean with one thing in each arm. In his right arm was the unnamed baby boy, bundled up in a thin layer of cat skin and looking up at his mother with his deep, violet, soulless eyes that Timo couldn’t bear to look at without wanting to just throw the baby in the ocean and be done with this harrowing task. But in the other arm, he held a small carrier with some durable wood on the bottom. The carrier would float across the water, bringing the newborn to someone else who would either keep him or kill him. To Timo, either was fine.

He took the newborn (a rope and paper pendant around his fat neck, the paper reading “Finnish-Swede” on it to indicate the boy’s heritage) and laid him in the carrier, strapping him in by tying a rope across his chest and down to his lap. He then placed the carrier on the water and pushed it away, watching it disappear with the currents.

And as Timo left to go home to his husband, he could swear that he heard the little boy cry for the first time.


	2. Discovery

Arthur sighed, diving his bucket into the water and pulling out a draft or two of warm water into the aluminum canister. He was sighing because of his current situation; he was single and very unable to have children. It's a sad world when women and men are told that they can't have children, but for Arthur, the impact to the fact was doubled, merely because all of his brothers had children already and were married (mostly to each other, and Arthur would've gone that direction if the youngest of the six was a good eleven years younger than him and still a minor at the time). It was a sad world when even his twelve year old little brother had gone and made love to another boy just a year or two older than himself and found that he was pregnant. Now twelve year old Peter had moved all the way out of Blazia and gone to Crystalline to be with his lover. He lived with him, his two older brothers, and the tenant of the building they all lived in. Oh, how jealous Arthur was. Oh, how angry Arthur was.

He sighed yet again as he started making his way back to his little shack, which was just off the coast. It was made of bricks he had smashed together into a makeshift little home with no roof over it, which caused the rare spell of rain to make Arthur suffer. He wished he was able to do something to make money, but that was impossible at this point. He didn't know how sex worked because no one had ever wanted to make love to him. He was infertile and unable to even think about getting pregnant because it would never happen to him. He had no real skill; he and his brothers had never been able to afford school (but despite that, the other four managed to get decent jobs once they taught themselves how to do something right, which was something that Arthur could never do). He was poor and had to fucking deal with it at this point in his life, especially at twenty-three years old.  
Halfway back to his "house", Arthur froze (which was rather ironic considering where he lived). He heard something; a cry or a wail of some sort. The strangest part about the noise was that it seemed to be coming from the direction of the ocean, but he couldn't see any boats coming across. He looked, scouring for anything that might be the source of the noise. And suddenly, he saw it.

It was a baby carrier, with a baby inside.

Before Arthur even knew it, he was out into the water, getting his clothes wet as he went. The coast started up at his ankles, but the farther out he went, the deeper it got. His chest and above was all that was above the water when he grabbed the carrier and started sluggishly running back through the water to get back to the shore. He was panting by the time he got out of it; his legs were shaking from the cold and his arms were heavy with the carrier, but he had to get over to solid ground and make a fire to warm the both of them up, whether the baby was part of his imagination or not. If the baby was actually there, it might have been colder than he was; this baby most likely came from Crystalline to have made it all the way across to him like this, depending on how all the currents brought the baby to him. Who knows; it could've just come from another part of the United Kingdom, but it was impossible to tell for sure.

Arthur sat the baby inside his little brick pile, grinning gently as he turned the carrier to face him in order to see the baby inside, or to see whether the carrier was imaginary and the baby's cries were just a hallucination manifested as a result of grief from not being able to conceive. And to his shock (he didn't expect this at all, really), there was genuinely a baby inside. He obviously had a few things wrong with him, but it was okay. He was still beautiful; a gorgeous baby with beautiful pale skin and wispy blond hair.

“Oh, little one.” 

Arthur whispered this as quietly as he could manage, so as not to startle the baby. He kept smiling and picked up the baby out of his carrier, just to kiss him on the forehead before putting him back. He left the brick pile and came back with a small amount of wood, putting it in a pile and rubbing two sticks together until he got a fire going. Once he did, he grabbed the baby and held him close as he sat in front of the fire with him. To his shock, the baby began to wail at the warmth.

“So… you are from the other side of the world, huh?” 

He huffed disappointedly and pulled him away from the fire, inspecting the blanket he was wrapped in. A beautiful length of ice blue silk, thin and clearly expensive. He hid it under a thick wool blanket; he would have to sell it for good money later. Anything for this baby. 

Anything.

“Let’s see,” he said, picking up the baby and inspecting the makeshift necklace around his neck. “You’re a Finnish-Swede? You’ve come a long way from home, little one. And I suppose you’re mine now… Lukas Kirkland.”

He kissed the baby’s forehead and began making his way to town with the silk.


	3. Leaving

**16 years later**

Arthur yawned, sighing as he stacked another book on the bookshelf to his right. Lukas walked in the door, giving a gentle huff and handing a couple of bags to Arthur. The bags were composed of cloth, specifically cloth made from the fur of rabbits. Usually, the bags that Lukas and Arthur used were handmade; Lukas shot the rabbits and skinned them while Arthur sewed them together and used the bones of the animal to make tools while using its organs for food. It wasn't that they believed in "waste not, want not", but rather that it was just convenient for them to use all of the materials for themselves, especially since they weren't the most well off when it came to money.

Lukas was able to provide for them, however. He had enough skills in hunting, some way or another. When Lukas was seven, he was able to save up enough money from selling old possessions on the street to buy one of the guns that he had seen in a store window that had fascinated him since he was almost three. He shot it for the fire time at merely a fawn. And the fur he got from it was sold for him to get another box of bullets, and the cycle continued. Lukas would shoot animals, sell the fur (or use it for personal reasons like the bags, occasionally), and use the money to buy necessities for him and Arthur while the rest of the animal went to use for them as well. And at the time, the boys were saving up for a much better house than the brick pile with dirt floors for beds and deer fur for blankets.

Arthur grinned, opening one of the bags and taking a good look at the contents. "Well, well, well! Did someone go to the farmers' market today?"

Lukas nodded gently, giving him a verbal confirmation while speaking in his typical deadpan tone. He had spoken like that even since he had started blabbering as a baby; the only noises that he made that seemed to have any sort of emotion behind them were his sobs, but he hadn't even cried since he was two years old, and he was sixteen now. No one had really heard him talk like anything else since he was a child. But Arthur loved him, either way, no matter how he sounded or what he looked like. 

Speaking of appearances, Lukas's cleft lip had completely healed itself, and he looked absolutely normal in every sense of the word. The only difference between him and the average person in Blazia was that he would often take a boat all the way over to Crystalline simply to "cool off", as he had put it. Arthur had never told anyone where exactly the baby had come from; he had simply told everyone who asked that he was a miracle sent by the Lord himself (so everyone assumed that Arthur was given permission to have a child by God; it helped their minds to accept it by the fact that Arthur and Lukas looked so alike).

Lukas sighed, grabbing his gun and leaving. Arthur frowned and followed him out the door. "Where are you going, love?"

The boy shrugged, keeping his rifle to his side. He wasn’t much for talking either. Arthur followed him, knowing there was only reason he wouldn’t exactly tell his mother where he was going. “I’m coming with you… I want to grab my coat.” He went into the brick pile and grabbed a fur coat that he had made from the fur of a few white-tailed deer that Lukas had shot not long back.

“Mother,” Lukas started, “you’re not made for the cold.”

“Who cares whether I’m made for the cold or not?”

“I do. Besides, I have family that I want to go see in Crystalline.”

Lukas sighed and went to his boat, a small package already on it. Obviously food he had bought for the trip while he was in the farmer’s market. Arthur sat in the little rowboat beside the package as Lukas sat across from him and grabbed the oars, beginning to move the boat.

“How long of a journey shall this be?” Arthur asked quietly, trying not to startle his son.

“It usually takes around three hours.”

Arthur sighed, kissing his son’s cheek. “I trust you to get us there. So, where do you go, anyway?”

“Denmark, but I can drop you off where you need to go.”

“I need to get to Latvia… I can cross through Estonia to get there, though.”

Lukas gently shook his head. “It’s just a slight detour, Mother. It’ll be alright I’m just about half an hour later than I said I would be.”

“Where are you headed anyway, Lukas? You never tell me why in the world you’re going to Crystalline whenever you leave Blazia!”

Lukas stopped rowing the boat, leaving the pair floating in the middle of whatever sea or ocean or gulf or whatever the hell the two were stopped at during that given moment. “It’s not your business, Mother.”

“Not my business?! I am your mother!”

“I know, but I want a little privacy. Is that okay?”

Arthur paused and looked down to the bottom of the wooden boat, a frown replacing the scowl that had been there moments before. “Absolutely, love.”

They sat in silence for hours before Arthur was dropped off in Latvia, alone until he made his way to Liepāja by a rented horse, making his way to the mansion that should’ve been his. It belonged to his little brother, pregnant and aged fifteen years, and his lover, the father of little Peter‘s baby. Named Raivis, the eighteen year old boy was the youngest of three brothers. The oldest brother, Tolys, was twenty-four, and the second oldest boy, Eduard, was aged twenty-one.

Arthur gulped, standing in front of the door to the mansion and knocking sheepishly. There was a shout of “Coming!” and loud, quick footsteps. Soon enough, a heavily pregnant Peter answered the door. His smile very rapidly turned into a frown. “Artie. What do you want?”

“You know I despise that nickname a great deal. Now, if you care about me ay, I would suggest letting me in to sit by the fire before I freeze to near death!”

Peter growled and was clearly about to slam the door in his face, but just then, Raivus came over. Peter was a completely different person around Raivus, but maybe that was because he loved him to death, himself, and didn’t want to split from him at all if he could help it. A better attitude around his lover would definitely keep that from happening. Raivus was easily upset too; if he found out that Peter was fighting with anyone, whether it be his brother or the king, he would leave Peter for sure, and even take the baby with him.

Raivus kissed Peter’s cheek, and the light blond smiled at the Latvian as he opened the door and motioned for Arthur to enter, which he did. And over tea and small talk, Peter slowly fell asleep, and Arthur went upstairs to the guest room to get his forty winks, as well.


End file.
